


The Morning After I Died

by ButterflyGhost



Category: due South
Genre: AU, Dark, F/M, M/M, choose your own ray - Freeform, vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:36:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5025088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ButterflyGhost/pseuds/ButterflyGhost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This one actually creeped me out. I'm posting it anyway, as part of the ushobwri October challenge; if you don't like it, don't bite me.</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Morning After I Died

**Author's Note:**

> This one actually creeped me out. I'm posting it anyway, as part of the ushobwri October challenge; if you don't like it, don't bite me.

It would comfort me if I were, in fact, delusional. I would far sooner be mad than as I am.

 

When I was young and knew everything, the mere idea would have been laughable. Had anyone suggested it to me my first thought would have been that they were making a poor joke. My second thought would have been that they were in need of medical attention.

 

My first time. So very nearly my last. The urgency to couple shocked me. Right on death's door, and all I could think of was her nails, her teeth, the pain. I was fucking like an animal while she sucked my life right out of me; suckling like a baby as she gave me back my blood. I was so grateful to her. I didn't even know what she had done.

 

Until that point in my life I had considered myself fortunate; I was free from the compulsion of sex. I was glad of it. I would listen to the locker room talk, the boasts, the commiserations. The braggadocio and hopelessness of my peers both puzzled and saddened me. I felt like an anthropologist. The other cadets were as foreign to me as the first European explorers must have been to the Inuit.

 

At the time, in my arrogance, I thanked God that I wasn't cursed that way. And in the first year after Graduation, I was called to so many 'domestics' that I knew the victims and their abusers by name. What baffled me most was that the victims stayed. 'He loves me,' they would say, and shut the door until next time.

 

How could they bear it? I wanted to hold a mirror up to them, although I knew they were so lost they wouldn't even see their image in the glass. 'Look,' I wanted to say. 'Is this what love looks like? Why would you stay with your abuser? Because he swears he loves you?'

 

She swore that she loved me. I woke the morning after I died, and did not even wonder why I didn't feel cold. All I could think was that I had to have her. I had to take her, let her take me, as often as I could. She looked triumphant, I remember that, even as she bit me again. And God, the look she gave me when I remembered myself, my duty. The expression of hate on her face when I turned her in. She didn't think that I could do that. I don't know how I could.

 

Years later, she told me again that she loved me. By that time, of course, I knew what I was. I had spent so many years fighting it, addicted to the hunt. I thought that I had learned balance; with one glance she undid me. _Come with me, Ben,_ she said, and I followed like a dog. Because the first time I - the first time we -

 

_Her voice was a golden ribbon. Her voice was a winding chain. Her fingers in my mouth tugged me out of darkness. I was a fish on her hook, drowning in alien air._

 

God, how I loved her.

 

She is gone, and there is metal nestled by my spine. Cold steel protects against _them,_ or so I've heard. A stake through my heart would have been cleaner, but I don't deserve that mercy. However it happened, though, I do know that I am finally free of her.

 

Free of her, but not of the compulsion.

 

Now that she is gone I can see the world again. People move around me, and I hear their hearts beat, smell the tide of blood beneath their skin. I wear my own skin as armour, hide my face behind my smile.

 

I can't hide for much longer. I know this. Hunting anonymous strangers will no longer be enough. Feeding off their arousal, confusion and fear will no longer be enough. Leaving them alive will no longer enough.

 

More and more my eyes follow him when he is not looking. Sometimes when he relaxes, I allow my gaze to settle on his throat. I could kiss him there and bite, and he would not even know that it was too late.

 

I wish that I could warn him. But I know that I will take.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of Ushobwri's October themed challenges. In this case the prompt was: 'Not alive, not dead either.'


End file.
